Configuration in Zend Framework 2

First of all, to be honest - Zend Framework 2 is not ready for use at all. Of course, it brings many interesting concepts, but the problem is that you need to dig them out the hard way with numerous WTFs all the time. The documentation is incomplete and there are no best practices yet. The guys designing ZF2 made it extremely modular with components that are loosely coupled and reusable. Anti-patterns like the singleton pattern has been thrown away and dependency injection "rules them all". The question is - how to assemble a working application? The simple answer is - as you like. As a side effect to the modularity, different pieces of configuration,  autoloading and bootstrapping are scattered all over the directory structure and it's up to you what "strategy" to use. Nevertheless, there are some notions of best practices, which can be found in the documentation or in some tutorials. In this post I'll begin with the configuration.

DokuWiki Shibboleth authentication backend updated and moved to GitHub

Few years ago I wrote a Shibboleth authentication backend for DokuWiki. So far it worked well, but recently I needed some additional features, so I made few modifications and enhancements:

• moved the project to GitHub
• changed the license from the restrictive GPL2 to FreeBSD
• added an option to use the DokuWiki session instead of the Shibboleth session - the Shibboleth session is checked only upon login
• the authentication backend and the login plugin are now in one single package
• improved example configuration - better formatting and comments, you can edit it, put it in the conf/ directory and simply include it in your local.php file
• refactored the code to be more PHP 5.x compliant

You can get the code from the GitHub repository.

Data encryption with OpenSSL in PHP

PKI is well-known and widely spread technology. It is very easy to use it for data encryption in PHP using the standard OpenSSL extension. Data are encrypted with the public key and decrypted with the private key. There is one restriction though - the size of data encrypted with the public key can be up to the length of the key (usually 1024 or 2048 bytes), which may not be enough. Of course, you could divide your data into chunks and encrypt them separately, but there is a better solution.

File upload widget for ExtJS 4.x

In a project I'm working on, I needed a flexible file upload panel with multiple file upload support. Unfortunately, the ExtJS built-in mechanisms (Ext.form.field.File) does not support multiple upload and there are some other limitations as well. I searched for a user contributed plugin, but I couldn't find a suitable one. Most of the contributions were written for older versions of ExtJS - 3.x or even 2.x. So I decided to write one myself, trying to use some advanced features of HTML5.

You may first check the live demo.

Using the window.onerror handler for logging javascript errors

I'm running a really large administration application with javascript based user interface. It is used by a large number of users on different computers with different operation systems and different browsers. Sometimes weird javascript errors occur. And when such error occurs, the browser stops the execution of the script and the users usually reports something like "it didn't work".

Luckily, there is a way how to handle this and although it may not cover 100% of all the errors, it might be helpful when dealing with errors at the client side. If you define the window.onerror handler, it will be executed when an error occurs. Three arguments are passed to the handler - the error message, the URL of the script and the line, where the error is located.

Shibboleth authentication adapter for the Zend Framework

I have been running some sites under a Shibboleth Service Provider for quite a long time. In some cases I had to modify applications written in PHP to be able to use Shibboleth authentication. But now I reached the point, when I had to implement Shibboleth authentication in my own application. Since I'm using Zend Framework for years, the natural way to achieve that was implementing a Shibboleth authentication adapter for the Zend_Auth component.

Simple horizontal text scrolling with Ext Core 3 (marquee replacement)

For one of my projects I needed to implement a line of scrolling text at the top or at the bottom of the browser window. One of the options was to use the non-standard marquee HTML element, which I rejected for obvious reasons. Plus, it didn't work very well - the motion was not smooth and there were too few options to customize its behaviour. So I decided to implement the text scrolling using Javascript.

 There are plenty of code examples on the web. In fact, it's fairly easy, you just need to update the text position using CSS properties. Since I'm used to the ExtJS framework i wrote a simple class using the Ext Core 3 library. Actually I didn't need the high-level features of ExtJS, but I wanted to take advantage of the cross-borswer support, that's why I used the low-level library Ext Core.

Relyiable hashes in PHP

Sometimes we need to maintain simple hashes, but at the same time we don't want to have them cracked too easily. When using a hash function on a not too complex string (like a single word), there is a risk, that the hash can be cracked using rainbow tables in few minutes.

Initializing objects from other objects in PHP

Sometimes we need to initialize an object based on another object. Typically, if we have a class MyClass and subclass MyExtendedClass with some additional functionality, we may need to turn a MyClass object into a MyExtendedClass object. How to do that easily in PHP?

Dokuwiki Shibboleth authentication backend

DokuWiki is a standards compliant, simple to use Wiki, mainly aimed at creating documentation of any kind. It is targeted at developer teams, workgroups and small companies. It has a simple but powerful syntax which makes sure the datafiles remain readable outside the Wiki and eases the creation of structured texts. All data is stored in plain text files – no database is required. (description taken from DokuWiki homepage).